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NTSB: Wayward pilots completely unaware of predicament

A single call from a flight attendant to the
pilots of the Northwest Airlines plane that overshot Minneapolis
catapulted the cockpit crew from complacency to chaos.

Interviews with the flight crew and other documents released
Wednesday by the National Transportation Safety Board indicate the
pilots were completely unaware of their predicament until the
moment the intercom rang - unaware that they had flown their Airbus
A320 with 144 passenger more than 100 miles past their destination,
that air traffic controllers and their airline's dispatchers had
been struggling to reach them for more than an hour, or that the
military was at that moment readying fighter jets for an intercept
mission.

Timothy Cheney, the captain of Flight 188, said he looked up
from his laptop to discover there was no longer any flight
information programmed into the Airbus A320's computer. He said his
navigation system showed Duluth, Minnesota, off to his left and Eau
Claire, Wisconsin, ahead on the right.

The plane had been out of radio contact for 77 minutes as it
flew across a broad swath of the country on Oct. 21, raising
national security concerns.

Cheney, 54, and First Officer Richard Cole, 54, told
investigators they had taken out their laptops and were absorbed in
working on a complicated crew scheduling program that they were
required to learn following Delta Air Lines' aquisition of
Northwest a year earlier.

The tension of the moment was evident in the crew interviews.

According to a statement signed by flight attendant Barbara
Logan, she called the cockpit around 8:15 p.m. CDT to find out when
they would be landing. She was told they would land around 12
Greenwich Mean Time. "I said I did not know the time - he said I
was hosed and hung up."

The lead flight attendant called to get gate information and was
apparently also hung up on, according to Logan's report. That
flight attendant later got through to the cockpit.

It turns out Flight 188 wasn't the only Northwest operation that
was hard to reach that night. A controller who called Northwest
Airlines' dispatchers to ask them to contact the plane first
encountered a recording telling him the phone number had been
changed. He dialed the new number, but the phone rang 10 to 20
times without being answered, he told investigators. He hung up,
then redialed.

This time, someone at Northwest Airlines dispatchers' office
answered the phone - and put him on hold for a few minutes. The
controller said he stayed on the phone rather than try calling
again because it had been so hard to get through.

Northwest Airlines dispatchers sent messages to the cockpit
asking them to contact air traffic controllers, but there was no
response.

The Federal Aviation Administration has since said the phone
numbers controllers had for Northwest predated its acquisition by
Delta and have now been updated.